No Loki, No likey.

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October 23, 2013

And so the saga of Thor continues. We first met the mighty Asgardian in 2011, when he was arrogant, impulsive and full of hubris, only learning humility when marooned on earth and surrounded by puny humans.

He ended that film a more measured and mature warrior, which readied him to team up with The Avengers for 2012’s biggest blockbuster, in which he once again helped save our planet from alien invasion. And little over 12 months later he’s back for a third outing, this time in the entertaining if somewhat silly and derivative Thor: The Dark World.

The film kicks off with a prologue that finds Thor’s grandfather doing battle with an army of ‘Dark Elves’, led by the menacing Malekith, a seriously angry elf who is hellbent on plunging the world into darkness.

His plan revolves around harnessing the power of ‘The Aether’, which is one of those mysterious destructive forces that films like this need in order to further their plot but never properly explain.

He fails in his efforts however, but not before sacrificing the majority of his people and sticking himself and a few survivors into hibernation.

Thor’s Gramps meanwhile, on realising that he can’t actually destroy the Aether, instead buries it where no one will be able to find it. Of course, it's found in the first 30 minutes.

Yet while it’s nice to learn about Asgard’s back-story and heritage, time waits for no God, and so we immediately jump forward to the present-day, where Thor’s brother Loki is imprisoned on Asgard following the events of The Avengers, his girlfriend Jane Foster is stuck on earth and wondering where he’s gone and why he didn’t call while said events were taking place, and Thor himself is travelling through the Nine Realms kicking ass and taking names with Lady Sif and the Warriors Three.

It’s in these scenes that we first get an inkling as to why Marvel charged Alan Taylor with the task of helming the picture, his ability to stage and shoot a battle – honed while working on Game of Thrones – meaning that Thor: The Dark World has some of the best action sequences yet seen in a superhero movie.

Taylor has a more naturalistic approach than Kenneth Branagh employed on the previous flick, thrusting his camera into the heart of battle so that the fight scenes have a grittiness and muscularity that serve the story well.

But the Warriors soon complete their task, bringing peace to the Realms so that early on in proceedings, The Dark World is suffering from a severe lack of drama and conflict beyond Thor arguing with his Dad about the differences between a king and a man. And standing around with his top off for no apparent reason.

Praise Odin’s beard then that the Convergence is approaching, a beautiful but dangerous cosmic event in which all of the Realms align. And don’t worry if you don’t understand this aspect of the plot, as it’s explained over-and-over again throughout the film.

The event coincides with Malekith waking from his slumber and going after the Aether, putting him on a collision course with Thor on Asgard and Jane on earth. And then Jane on Asgard and Thor on earth. And as worlds align and portals open, the action traverses between these realms and several others on an all-too-regular basis, making for a somewhat schizophrenic viewing experience that at times confuses.

It doesn’t help that Malekith is a pretty weak antagonist, with much of the misery that drives the film’s villain seemingly brought on himself. There’s no doubting that Christopher Eccleston is an excellent actor, but here he’s buried under mountains of prosthetics, and the audience spends so little time with the character that we never get a true sense of who he is or what his motives are.

And in spite of the fact that the film clocks in just under two hours, it also feels like we don’t spend enough time with Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. In The Avengers he was part of a hugely charismatic ensemble, but when it comes to Thor – where the title character is often the straight man – he’s pretty much the star of the show, and so scenes where he’s not onscreen feel like a wasted opportunity.

Indeed the film kicks up a gear when he and Thor are compelled to join forces, and rather than squabbling with each other – as they have done in previous efforts – their dynamic becomes infinitely more interesting; the film all-the-more fun because of it.

Which is more than can be said for the relationship between Thor and Jane, which may well be the least interesting aspect of the narrative, a potential love triangle between the pair and Lady Sif briefly thrown into the mix before quickly and mercifully being dropped.

Jane’s friendship with intern Darcy does allow Kat Dennings to once again flex her comedic muscles, and more of her one-liners hit the mark here than in the original Thor. Indeed this may rival Iron Man 3 for the title of ‘funniest Marvel movie yet,’ with Chris O’Dowd raising laughs in a couple of brief appearances, Stellan Skarsgard stripping off for a hilariously clothes-free cameo as Dr. Erik Selvig, and Thor’s ‘fish-out-of-water’ shtick still working three films in.

But perhaps the funniest character this time around – albeit unintentionally – is Idris Elba’s Heimdall, the returning Sentinel who possesses the ability to see and hear events in faraway galaxies. Heimdall has one job, which is to guard the gate at Asgard’s Observatory. And yet he fails on that front quite spectacularly in The Dark World, the character’s incompetence making him quite possibly the worst bouncer in the cosmos.

The film’s biggest problem is that it fails to take the Thor franchise to the next level however. Post-Avengers, Marvel’s standalone superhero movies have to work doubly hard to make their mark, which the aforementioned Iron Man 3 did by raising the stakes and stripping Tony Stark bare so that you genuinely thought that it might be the end for him.

But Thor: The Dark World feels less like a dramatic escalation and more like bland continuation, the action improved but the story – which was written by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely – unimaginative and uninvolving, at times feeling like it’s been cobbled together from bits of other comic book movies. There’s a huge contrivance involving Jane Foster that’s somewhat unforgivable. And come on guys – Charing Cross to Greenwich on the Tube in three stops? Seriously?

That said, the film does manage to avoid climaxing with the kind of cliché-ridden city-wide destruction that has become the hallmark of the genre in recent years. East London does take a bit of a battering during the finale, but the film nevertheless finds an alternate route to close out its narrative; one that cleverly combines comedy and action for something approaching a satisfying conclusion.

The Verdict

The result is a good Thor movie when post-Avengers we wanted a great one. Director Alan Taylor shoots a fine action sequence and the jokes come thick-and-fast. But a weak storyline and even weaker villain mean that The Dark World never quite hits the highs of its standalone predecessor, and underlines the fact that this franchise needs Loki, and lots of him.